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Approximately one-third of the fuel energy consumed by an internal combustion engine flows out the tailpipe as waste heat. Thermoelectric devices are being considered as a means of utilizing some of this waste heat to generate electric power on vehicles. A 1.1-liter volume flat plate heat exchanger was fabricated to study the heat transfer characteristics of a conceptual design for thermoelectric waste heat recovery from diesel exhaust, and used to validate a heat exchanger model. The heat exchanger consisted of an exhaust channel and two coolant channels all having rectangular cross-sections. The experimentally measured heat transfer rates were compared with a finite element heat transfer model to be used both for heat exchanger development and modeling thermoelectric device performance. In both the model and the experiment, alumina paper was used as a surrogate for the thermoelectric materials.